I don't know if you are aware, but the eService accelerator was replaced by the customer portal last spring. The new portals support all deployment models. The portals have also been upgraded to CRM 2011 support, and will be available in the
marketplace very soon. The old eService and events accelerators are no longer supported and will not be ported to CRM 2011.

After using the customer portal & eService tools there are many cases where the eService tool is a better fit.

If you don't need the content management, event management, and windows live then the customer portal can add unrequired complexity. For asp.net developers the design of the eService was easier to pickup and extend than the customer portal.

Hopefully someone in the community converts the eService to 2011 as it is a great solution. (If the licencing agreement lets you)

The customer portal is built upon the xRM portal framework which is now in the CRM SDK. This framework does have a CMS, but you are not required to use it at all. You can certainly use the simple data source controls, LINQ query provider, and
other controls in standard asp.net web pages. I would completely disagree with you that the code in the old eService accelerator is easier than the new controls in the xRM portal framework. The eService framework required your developers to work
with a LOT of different code, and make modifications to it to suit their needs, and it only has a very small subset of functionality compared to the xRM portal framework. The portal framework was designed as a framework to simplify web development and
make it 'just like sql'. Even the act of connecting to CRM is as simple as a connection string. It is also brought forward to newer versions of ASP.NET, where the old eService accelerator was designed using ASP.NET 1.x & 2.0 capabilities.

The only thing that I view as overly complex in the customer portals is the Live ID implementation. It was shipped using the best practices and dealt with all known security threats. As such, the invitation mechanism and registration process
is a little complex, especially if you are not familiar with Live ID. That said, the portal supports any membership provider and the customer portal is not tied to Live ID specifically.

Can you point out what specifically is so good in the eService accelerator that wasn't good in the portals so that I can review the functionality in the portals to see what needs to be improved or new functionality that could be brought forward to CRM 2011?

The eService accelerator was deprecated in CRM 4, with all of the functionality being replaced by the customer portal accelerator. The customer portal was released last spring for CRM 4. The eService accelerator was not upgraded to CRM 2011, but the
Customer Portal accelerator was upgraded and is now available in the marketplace at the following url:

I have E Service Acc. installed and I am going to upgrade my CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011. WIll this upgrade the E Service acc. with it or will this fail the whole upgrade or will the upgrade for CRM go through and E Service components are just going to be left as
orphan something like what happens with C360 stuff.

The CRM solution should upgrade with no issues but you might fight with the requirement of having the CRM 4 SDK installed on the server. The entities will be unmanaged after the upgrade. You then have the option of installing the customer or
partner portal solution, which will then take the unmanaged entities and turn them into managed entities from now on. Your old portal may or may not work - if you upgrade to the Customer Portal then you can use the portal code that comes with that in
order to host the website. Please note that we have only tested the upgrade experience from the CRM 4 customer portal not specifically from the older eservice or events accelerator that predated the customer portal accelerator.